The increased availability of customer connected home or business use appliances has led to a proliferation of a variety of personal or home automation systems. Such systems allow customers to remotely control various systems both from within and from outside their homes or businesses via their portable or wearable smart mobile devices using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, broadband Internet and cellular telephone networks. Examples of controllable functions include managing a home security system, controlling energy consumption within a premises by managing heating and lighting, accessing home media and entertainment (both across a user's home and in the user's automobile), monitoring vital parameters (e.g., heart rate, blood sugar) and providing timely information to life support systems, tracking children's whereabouts, and the like.
Multiple, off-the-shelf, customer connected home or business premises-based devices can be easily connected to the cellular, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi networks and controlled via an application/controller program that resides on a smartphone or other type of portable or wearable device. However, such “plug and play” systems pose at least two problems to the user. First, the user may be confused by being exposed to an unstructured and fragmented electronics ecosystem that has been created due to an ever growing choice of add-on devices coupled with evolving networking standards (e.g., Zigbee, Zwave, X10 and the like). In other words, the different customer connected devices do not comply with a single standard or a compatible communication protocol, and therefore, the connected devices do not interact well with one another. Secondly, many in home devices manufactured by different manufacturers require different applications on the user's mobile device; and those applications offer distinctly different user interfaces. Also, smartphone and wearable device applications developed by third party vendors may not be completely compatible with all connected devices or with each other, resulting in sub-par performance. For example, older computing devices may have operating systems that are out-of-date or even incompatible with operating systems of other devices. As a result, devices of the same manufacturer may not effectively communicate or interact with one another due to the incompatibility of the respective device operating systems or other compatibility issues, such as communication protocol differences. Even a broad-based, consolidated system may restrict the kind of devices that can be activated within an ecosystem.
Aside from the interoperability issues, there is yet another issue associated with multiple customer connected devices related to accessing a user's home network, such as a Wi-Fi network. Presently, the above referenced customer connected devices in a customer's home/Wi-Fi network are behind a router; and securely, be accessing in-home from a mobile device external to the home/Wi-Fi network represents a complex challenge. Each customer connected device has to be individually configured to connect to mobile applications and vice versa. If users want to connect multiple devices to their home/Wi-Fi network, each connected device has to maintain a separate connection with the outside network. Moreover, mobile devices outside the home/Wi-Fi network cannot initiate communication with the enabled customer connected devices inside the home/Wi-Fi network without manually configuring the router of the home network. Without assistance, the management of disparate devices that use differing communication standards eventually translates into a poor user/customer experience.
As a result, there is a need for improvement in managing disparate devices that are implemented behind a router of a premises local area network, such as a Wi-Fi network.